Data X-fer

I'm confused.

The old HD is a USB drive, correct? I don't see why you can't just connect it. Windows will find the drive and you're done.

 

Doesn't sound like he's using an external USB hard drive.

Most internal hard drives are connected to the motherboard via a ribbon cable; so I'm confused as to how you connected a power cable via USB.

Need to know what type of hard drive you're trying to connect, and how you connected the new hard drive.

Historically (I haven't pulled the guts out of a desktop in the last couple of years), the ribbon that connects the hard drive to the motherboard has two connectors. This is so you can connect two hard drives at the same time.

I recommend you attach the old hard drive to the second connector (unless I'm completely behind the times, and that's not how the old hard drive was connected to the motherboard). FIRST, however, you need to do some research on the old hard drive, and find out how to set the jumper settings so that it will be recognized as the slave, or second, drive. The jumpers are usually underneath where the ribbon connects to the hard drive; there's usually a set of 4 (maybe 5, it's been a while) paired metal pins; one set will have a plastic piece. Where the plastic piece is determines whether the hard drive is in master or slave mode.

If you attach the hard drive in master mode, you'll have two hard drives at the same time competing to be the master.

Once you have both hard drives connected, it's a simple matter of copying from the old drive to the new one. Then you can decide to keep the old one attached as a second hard drive, or go ahead and remove it (please remember to have the computer turned off while connecting or disconnecting the drives).

So give us some more information, and we'll see if we can point you in the right direction.

 

That's the exact source of my confusion. It may be that the drive is an IDE drive, but it could be a SATA drive, which is quite different. Without more information, we really can't give a solution to the issue.

 

Hey, don't leave us hanging! How did you solve it, so that we might have it as reference for a similar problem in the future?

 

If it is an IDE/ATA/PATA drive, it uses the wide flat cable. SATA drives use a slander cable.

Either way, just put it back in your computer as a secondary hard drive and away you go. If it is IDE, put the jumper as "slave" and put it on the second connector on the cable. If it is SATA, plug it into another SATA port and it's ready. Windows will recognize the drive and allow access to it under a different letter. then just drag and drop.